The Princess Bride
Starring: Robin Wright, Cary Elwes, Mandy Patinkin
Written by: William Goldman
Directed by: Rob Reiner
U.S.A., 1987
How good is this movie?
What can I say? It’s The Princess Bride, one of the sweetest, funniest, most thoroughly entertaining movies ever made! The first half hour is the best, but it’s all good. The fight scenes are exciting, the dialogue is very quotable, and it manages that delicate balance of humour and sincerity that so many films struggle with.
How ace is this movie?
The movie revolves around the romantic love story of Buttercup and Westley. This relationship is celebrated as a perfect example of True Love, a rare and wonderful thing that seems to grant the couple a special status. Everyone around them acknowledges that True Love is one of the best things in the world, and Buttercup and Westley see their love for each other as the most important thing in their lives. Even Fate seems to respect their love, with the lovers able to survive and overcome extraordinary dangers. As Westley once says, even “death cannot stop True Love.”
This is in the tradition of medieval Romances, where Love comforts and protects its heroes and is held up as the highest moral good. It’s a very heteronormative trope, with heterosexual love being represented as the best kind of love, heterosexual couples as more important than other people, and heterosexual union as the only thing necessary for a happy ending.
And yet I can’t help liking this story, not just in spite of my own aceness, but even because of it. Something that’s emphasised throughout the movie is that the kind of love Buttercup and Westley share is extremely rare. And, if that’s true, then it’s something very few people should expect to find. Unlike many rom coms, which treat True Love as a universal goal everyone should be searching for, The Princess Bride presents it as practically unattainable. And, as an ace-spectrum person, I actually find that comforting. If True Love is something “not one couple in a century” experiences, then not experiencing it is perfectly normal. It’s not a failure, and it doesn’t mean your life has to be miserable; it just means you should find other ways to give your life meaning.
There are plenty of other characters in the movie who haven’t found “True Love”. Some are unhappy and some are villainous, but not all. Fezzik and Iñigo are both decent people without a love interest or any apparent need for one. Instead of romantic love, Iñigo is driven by his love for his father, and his happy ending is to avenge his father’s murder. And, of course, the whole story is framed by the loving relationship of a grandfather and his grandson.
4 Stars; 3 Aces
Ace Film Reviews 
Oooh, glad to see you reviewed this- I love this movie. Very quotable.
Yes, I definitely agree that this movie presents “true love” as something so rare and unattainable. I think for me, seeing this idea in movies (not just “The Princess Bride” but a lot of movies/songs/etc), it made me believe that being in love was so special and magical and important, that if it happens to you, you have to pursue it. And then it turns out I’m the kind of person who has very strong romantic attraction/ crushes/ limerance, and it took me a long time to figure out this is just a feeling, and the feeling is not inherently good/ “meant to be”/ whatever. If I fall in love with someone that I can’t actually be with, then the healthy thing is for me to try to move on from that and eventually those feelings will go away. It’s not like “oh but this is so *rare* and *special* I need to hold on to it.”
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Ooo, good point! That is definitely a darker side to the “True Love” thing that I had not considered. I guess because I’ve never been in love (I’ve had crushes, but nothing I ever believed was my One True Love). So I didn’t consider how this trope would play to people who have.
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This comment by Perfect Number really hit home for me.
This is exactly what I’ve been dealing with in my situation with my LO. What I felt (and still feel tbh) for LO does feel so *rare* and *special* that it kind of doesn’t make sense that I have those feelings at all if I can’t be with him. Like, this whole thing puts me in a very confusing state of cognitive dissonance. And that factors into why I’ve gone completely No Contact with LO. (I hope the feelings will eventually go away … errr … how long do I have to wait for that to happen though? Lol)
I wonder whether media has conditioned me to think like this. 🤔 Wesley and Buttercup, not so much. I always felt like their love was unique and special and rare because of *reasons*. But there have been characters the love between whom really spoke to me. Anne and Gilbert from Anne of Green Gables, because of the slow build to a strong friendship. Roy and Hawkeye from Fullmetal Alchemist because of their shared trauma and shared journey to redemption (they’re not an explicit couple though; they’re relationship could be purely platonic). Finnick and Annie from The Hunger Games, again because of shared trauma. Jean Grey and Cyclops from the X-Men Evolution variation of the X-Men franchise, again because of shared experiences and strong friendship. These are some of the ones off the top of my head. And something I’ve liked about each of these pairs is how much they’ve fought for each other. They “held on to each other” and didn’t give up when the going got tough. I probably internalised something from these stories.
(Well of course, none of them have had one-sided feelings for each other. I don’t know why I have such a hard time accepting that my feelings are one-sided. But that’s another point altogether.)
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Yeah, if it’s 2 people who are committed to each other and sticking together through life’s challenges, that’s a completely different thing than a one-sided love. Which is something I totally never knew… I thought since my feelings were so strong and passionate and wonderful, that was like, an inherently good thing… (not sure if I should blame this on movies, or on Christian marriage teaching about how a wife should pray for her husband to get him to become a better person, with no concept of evaluating whether it’s even worth it to continue to be in a relationship with someone who doesn’t treat you right).
A post I wrote about that a while ago – If One Partner Doesn’t Want to Fix the Relationship, Then It’s Just Not Fixable https://tellmewhytheworldisweird.blogspot.com/2019/08/if-one-partner-doesnt-want-to-fix.html
Also- “I hope the feelings will eventually go away … errr … how long do I have to wait for that to happen though? Lol” yeah that’s very real… people always like to say “don’t worry, you’ll meet someone else” etc but I don’t know if that’s actually helpful or not.
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I think I’ve subconsciously thought this too. And I also thought that since my feelings are so strong and passionate and since I am so committed and devoted, that he’s gotta be moved by it and realize he feels the same way.
But then again, if someone came and told me they have really strong feelings for me and are committed and devoted, and it’s not based on a strong relationship that we have, and based on a narrative he created about me in his head, then I would just get annoyed because I would feel like his feelings have no real basis. (This actually did kind of happen to me … some guy on Reddit latched on to me based on stuff I said on there …he started sending me personal messages in which he started psycho-analyzing me based on his view of me … and I told him to stop and thankfully he did.)
And IDK if that’s what LO thought about me. And for a while I thought I must have been delusional and invented everything I felt about him in my head (in the way that Reddit guy did about me). I needed a lot of therapy (and talking to a lot of people who knew both me and LO) to convince myself that my feelings were real and there was a real and reasonable basis for them.
And THEN I finally learned that even if my feelings are sincere and genuine and real, it doesn’t mean, I will be, well, rewarded for having those feelings. I DO NOT know where I subconsciously picked up the idea that life will reward you if you have such true and genuine feelings. I’ve been struggling with this feeling of having been betrayed by life.
We have gone way off topic from The Princess Bride, but, to bring it back, I feel like that movie was kind of about life rewarding Wesley and Buttercup for their love and for staying true to their love through obstacles … (despite the fact that I still don’t understand what was the basis for their love, but oh well).
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This reply is directed at both sildarmillion and Perfect Number’s comments.
Maybe the factors mentioned in this conversation are part of the reason I’ve always appreciated unrequited love stories. As much as I like stories where two people fall in love and live happily ever after, I know that in real life romantic feelings often aren’t returned. Unrequited love stories acknowledge this fact while also (sometimes) granting unrequited love its own kind of nobility and beauty. I don’t mean stories about jealousy, where one party tries to hurt their love object or their love object’s partner. I mean stories where characters acknowledge their feelings and then deal with them as best they can.
I’m having trouble thinking of examples, but I’m sure I’ve seen a fair few. There’s Éponine in the musical version of Les Misérables. She dies tragically, of course, but she also gets to sing one of the play’s most moving songs! I didn’t care for Disney’s Huntchback of Notre Dame, but I do appreciate that Quasimodo ends up being fine with his beloved Esmeralda getting together with Phoebus. Unrequited feelings crop up in several movies I’ve seen about friendships between straight characters and queer characters. Even Luke Skywalker’s story kinda feels like it could qualify. I mean, now, as an adult, I tend to interpret Luke as an ace-spectrum character who never had anything but platonic feelings for Leia. But when I first watched Star Wars, as a child, I definitely thought Leia was Luke’s love interest, and was surprised, and even dismayed, when she got together with Han. But how does Luke react? Does he get angry, or try to hurt Han, or “steal” Leia back? No! He’s totally cool with it – even before he learns that Leia is his sister. And, yes, you can definitely read it as, “his feelings were platonic all along”. But it could also be that Luke did have romantic feelings for Leia but recognised that she didn’t feel the same way and accepted her choice. And I think that’s a good reading, too!
Anyway, my point is, in addition to stories about lovers who overcome all obstacles to be together, I think it’s also important to have stories where love leads to disappointment – because those stories can help us deal with our own disappointments.
sildarmillion:
“I always felt like [Westley and Buttercup’s] love was unique and special and rare because of *reasons*.”
Ha-ha! Yeah, that’s pretty much how I read The Princess Bride, too. 🙂
sildarmillion:
“(I hope the feelings will eventually go away … errr … how long do I have to wait for that to happen though? Lol)”
Good question; wish I knew the answer! I haven’t been in a situation exactly like yours, but I have had a few painful friend break-ups, and it took several years for things to get better. When they did, it was partly because I found new supportive relationships that… didn’t exactly take the place of the ones I’d lost, but at least compensated for them. And I think it was also because I found ways to synthesise the experiences and create something new out of them. For example, writing my Master’s not-Thesis about asexual romance helped me to process my feelings about former friends and allowed something good to come out of otherwise painful experiences.
The closest thing I’ve had to your experience is probably that incident I’ve mentioned before where I was friends with a guy I met overseas and started crushing on him shortly before I left the country. I then went and spent a year in a different country, and it was rough. I mean, shortly after I arrived I had a serious conversation with him about our relationship, and that helped a lot. But I still spent the entire year pining over him. Things were starting to get better by the time I left the country, but then I stopped by the first country on my way home and saw him again. The first couple of times we hung out, I was fine, but by the end of a week all the old feelings had come back. Leaving the country again was really painful, and I missed him all over again. BUT… as soon as I got back home, I was fine! I mean, I still cared about him, and when I thought about him I would still occasionally feel a pang of longing. But mostly the thought of him just made me smile. Somehow being in a different environment allowed me to close the chapter in my life to which he belonged, and he simply became a happy memory. One I occasionally feel wistful about, but not one that causes me pain.
I don’t know if there’s a takeaway from that. My experiences were different from yours in a lot of ways, and I doubt you’ll find them instructive. But I figured I’d share, anyway.
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Oooh interesting, I’m trying to think of examples of movies where there’s unrequited love and the characters just have to accept that’s the way it is- I can’t think of any.
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I have recently started appreciating stories of unrequited love, I suppose, after having experienced unrequited love myself. And while our situations are different in many ways, there’s something to be said for being able to have this community where we get to share our pain and commiserate, because they are also similar in many ways.
Anyways, I think most stories of unrequited love end with the person finding someone else, which feels kind of unsatisfying. But, I think some of the examples I mentioned in my latest comment on the review of When Harry Met Sally might fit the bill. Another movie I can think of is called The Little Black Book, which was a really interesting movie about a woman (Brittany Murphy) discovering her boyfriend is actually in love with someone else.
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